New Storytelling Series Incubates Understanding of the Sustainable Development Goals
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) represent humanity’s most ambitious shared project: a blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future. Comprising 17 interconnected goals, they address the global challenges we face, including poverty, inequality, climate change, environmental degradation, peace, and justice. Yet, for all their importance, the SDGs can feel abstract and immense. Presented as targets, statistics, and policy frameworks, their human dimension can be lost, rendering them distant and un-relatable, particularly for younger generations who are poised to inherit the world these goals aim to shape.
How, then, do we transform these global aspirations into personal, tangible realities? How do we move from passive awareness to active, empathetic engagement? This fall and winter, our storytelling program looks for a simple but profound answer: we must turn policy into poetry, data into drama, and statistics into stories.
The methodology and philosophy behind this program, which uses the creative process of narrative construction as a primary vehicle for learning about and internalizing the principles of the Sustainable Development Goals. In guiding youth and community artists through the architecture of storytelling—from character development and plot structure to world-building and thematic resonance—we empower them not just to learn about the SDGs, but to feel their urgency, imagine their solutions, and see themselves as agents in their realization. This is not just an exercise in creative writing; it is a practice in building empathy, fostering critical thought, and cultivating a generation of global citizens who understand that the world is not changed by grand decrees alone, but by the countless individual stories of courage, innovation, and compassion that unfold within them.
The Challenge: From Abstract Goals to Lived Realities
The very comprehensiveness of the SDGs is both their strength and their pedagogical challenge. A goal like “SDG 10: Reduced Inequalities” is a monumental concept, encompassing economic, social, and political dimensions across the globe. For a young learner, this can be an intimidating and nebulous idea. Traditional educational methods, such as presenting facts, figures, and case studies, can effectively convey the scale of the problem but often fail to bridge the emotional and psychological distance between the learner and the issue. Information is transmitted, but deep understanding and personal connection—the very precursors to meaningful action—remain elusive.
The risk is that the SDGs become another set of facts to be memorized for a test rather than a moral compass to be integrated into one’s worldview. The language of policy documents and UN reports is one of objectivity and scale, designed for governments and NGOs. It is not the language of the heart. To truly grasp what “SDG 2: Zero Hunger” means, one must move beyond the statistic of 800 million undernourished people and begin to imagine the experience of a single child, a single family, a single community. This is where the transformative power of narrative begins.
The Pedagogical Framework: Learning Through Creation
Our program is built on a constructivist pedagogical model, where learning is an active, experiential process of constructing knowledge rather than passively receiving it. The storyteller is not a vessel to be filled with information about the SDGs; they are an architect, building a world where the principles of the SDGs are tested, explored, and ultimately understood. The learning journey is embedded within the creative process itself, broken down into the fundamental components of narrative craft.
Character Development as a Vehicle for Empathy:
The first step in any story is the creation of a character. We guide participants to move beyond simple archetypes and build protagonists with hopes, fears, and flaws. When this process is framed by an SDG, it becomes a profound exercise in empathy. To craft a story around “SDG 6: Clean Water and Sanitation,” a participant must first imagine a character whose life is directly shaped by water scarcity. What is her name? What does her morning look like? What journey must she take to collect water, and what dreams does she defer to do so?
By answering these questions, the writer is forced to step into another’s shoes. The global issue of water scarcity is no longer an abstract statistic but a lived reality for a character they have brought to life. They are no longer an observer of the problem but a co-habitant of it. This active empathy-building is the foundational layer upon which all further understanding is built. The SDG ceases to be a “what” and becomes a “who.”
Conflict and Plot as Engines of Problem-Solving:
At its core, a story is about a character overcoming a conflict to achieve a goal. In our framework, the central conflict is almost always an embodiment of an SDG challenge. The protagonist’s desire for a better life is synonymous with the objective of a specific Goal.
- A story about two friends from different social backgrounds navigating a misunderstanding becomes a micro-narrative of “SDG 10: Reduced Inequalities.”
- A story about a community deciding how to manage a shared forest becomes a practical exploration of “SDG 15: Life on Land.”
- A story about a young girl inventing a new way to purify water for her village is a tangible representation of “SDG 9: Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure.”
The process of plotting the story—of outlining the beginning, middle, and end—becomes an exercise in critical thinking and creative problem-solving. The writer must ask: How does my character confront this challenge? What obstacles stand in her way? What resources—internal (courage, ingenuity) and external (community support, knowledge)—can she draw upon? This process mirrors the real-world innovation required to achieve the SDGs. It teaches participants that these global problems are not insurmountable monoliths but a series of obstacles that can be navigated with creativity, collaboration, and resilience. The plot structure provides a clear, manageable framework (rising action, climax, resolution) for thinking through complex issues that might otherwise seem overwhelming.
World-Building as an Introduction to Systems Thinking:
Every story takes place in a world, and the act of building that world, even on a small scale, is an introduction to systems thinking. To create a believable setting, the writer must consider the interconnected elements that define it. Does the story’s village have a school (“SDG 4: Quality Education”)? Is the local river clean or polluted (“SDG 14: Life Below Water”)? Are there safe spaces for children to play (“SDG 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities”)?
These choices are not merely descriptive backdrops; they are the systemic conditions that create or mitigate the story’s central conflict. This encourages participants to see how different aspects of a community and environment are linked. They begin to understand, intuitively, that a lack of education can exacerbate poverty, and that environmental degradation can impact health. Storytelling provides a sandbox for them to explore these complex interdependencies in a controlled and comprehensible way, laying the groundwork for a more sophisticated understanding of the interconnected nature of the 17 SDGs.
The Epistemological Foundation: Cultivating New Ways of Knowing
Beyond the “how” of teaching (pedagogy), our approach is rooted in a specific philosophy of knowledge (epistemology). We seek to cultivate a way of knowing the world that complements and enriches the empirical, data-driven knowledge typically associated with global development.
From Propositional to Narrative Knowledge:
Epistemology distinguishes between different types of knowledge. Propositional knowledge is “knowing that”—for example, knowing that millions of people lack access to electricity. This is factual and quantifiable. Narrative knowledge, however, is closer to “knowing what it’s like.” It is empathetic, qualitative, and experiential.
Our program is designed to bridge this gap. A participant may enter with the propositional knowledge that “SDG 7: Affordable and Clean Energy” is important. By writing a story about a character who has to finish their homework by candlelight and dreams of becoming a doctor, the participant develops a narrative understanding of what it’s like to live without reliable energy. This form of knowledge is not a substitute for data, but it is what gives data its meaning and moral weight. It is sticky, memorable, and far more likely to inspire action because it engages the whole person, not just the intellect.
Cultivating the Moral Imagination
Stories are the primary tool of the moral imagination. They are simulations that allow us to explore ethical dilemmas and their consequences in a safe, contained space. When a participant crafts a story, they are not simply arranging plot points; they are running an ethical-social experiment. What happens when one character acts selfishly versus collaboratively? What are the ripple effects of a small act of justice (“SDG 16: Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions”)? How does a community balance economic need with environmental protection (“SDG 12: Responsible Consumption and Production”)?
By working through these questions via their characters and plot, participants are engaging in a form of moral reasoning. They are developing their capacity to envision the outcomes of different choices, to weigh competing values, and to understand that “doing the right thing” is often complex and fraught with challenges. This process is essential for developing the sophisticated ethical framework required to navigate the real-world trade-offs and decisions inherent in sustainable development.
The Story as a Constructed Artifact of Knowledge
In line with constructivist theory, the final story is not merely a creative output; it is an artifact of the participant’s learning. It is the tangible evidence of their journey from abstraction to understanding. The story represents their unique synthesis of the SDG’s principles, their own creativity, and their empathetic connection to the characters they’ve created.
This epistemological stance is empowering. It validates the learner’s own interpretation and voice. It communicates that understanding global goals is not about memorizing a single, correct answer, but about engaging with the principles and finding ways to express them that are authentic to one’s own perspective. The knowledge is not “out there” to be found; it is “in here” to be built.
The Sustainable Development Goals: From Awareness to Agency
The goal of education in the 21st century cannot be simple awareness. In a world saturated with information, the greater challenge is to cultivate the wisdom, empathy, and creative resolve to act upon that information. The Sustainable Development Goals are not a checklist to be completed but a future to be built, and building requires imagination.
Our storytelling series is, at its heart, an incubator for that imagination. Immersing participants in the craft of narrative, we guide them on a journey that parallels the very essence of the SDGs themselves: a journey of identifying a problem, empathizing with those it affects, imagining a solution, and plotting a course of action to achieve it.
The process transforms them from passive spectators of global issues into active authors of potential solutions. They learn that every significant change in the world began as a story—a story of a reality that was unjust or unsustainable, and a story of how it could be different. By teaching them to write these stories, we are giving them the most fundamental tool for shaping a better world: the ability to imagine one.
Sharing Our Stories about the Sustainable Development Goals
Stories from the project have been published through a variety of bookstores and books outlets in Canada, the United States and internationally, including: Barnes and Noble, Internet Bookstore Italia, Palace Marketplace, Thalia, Overdrive, Standaard Boekhandel and many more.
Acknowledgements
This project started in spring and summer 2025 with support from the Ontario Arts Council Multi and Inter-Arts Projects program and the OpenAI Researcher Access Program. It builds on three years of prior research supported by programs funded by the Canada Council for the Arts, Manitoba Arts Council, Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Global Dignity Canada and the Labovitz School of Business and Economics at the University of Minnesota Duluth. We also acknowledge the incredible support of Tony Eetak, Eva Suluk and Jamie Bell from The Arts Incubator Winnipeg; Terri Bell and Maurice Betournay from the Art Borups Corners collective; Dr. Olaf Kuhlke and Krish Agrawal from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design Creative Entrepreneurship program and Dr. Wenqing Zhang from the Labovitz School of Business and Economics, University of Minnesota Duluth.
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